Or, how not to deal with difficult social issues.

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Watching "Donglegate" unfold over the past few days has been like watching a comedy of errors slowly metastasize into a tragedy of thoughtlessness. News coverage of what unfolded at (and after) this year's PyCon developer conference has already been written; I'll assume that you’re up to speed. What follows is straight opinion about a silly situation.

As events unfolded from Sunday until today, partisans quickly formed to weigh in on some key questions. Was SendGrid evangelist Adria Richards right or wrong to take offense at the jokes in question? Were the two male developers out of bounds with their "dongle" comments? Did they even say the things they were accused of? Was taking the matter right to Twitter the wrong way to go? Was the termination of two people—including Richards herself—a preferred outcome? How did DDoS vigilantes get involved in a complaint over some genital jokes? Finally: how long until the lawsuits?

Let's start by spreading the blame where it's deserved: on nearly everyone involved. The "Boy’s Club” mentality is thankfully no longer acceptable in tech, but it's still common—some people have actually described tech to me as "men's work." The jokes appear to run afoul of PyCon's code of conduct, which strives to create a welcoming atmosphere for everyone, and their unfunny-ness is equaled only by their lameness. “Forking a repo” and “big dongles” must rank somewhere around "0.5: classless brospeak" on the seismic scale of harassing/menacing behavior toward women. While such sexually inappropriate comments are completely unnacceptable in professional settings (to many men as well as women), neither merits firing unless someone had a history of making unwelcome comments. A teaching opportunity should not generally be turned into a termination event. (PlayHaven, which employed both developers, says that it will not comment "on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways" with one developer, so it's not clear what the exact situation here was.)

Suddenly, a couple off-color jokes represented all the serious forces that can hold women back from tech careers.

Yet these two men don’t get all of the blame. One recurring theme on message boards and chat rooms, including our own, is that while Richards had every right to report the behavior of the two men to conference organizers, snapping their photograph and posting it publicly to "Twitter shame" them was a step too far (speaking of a step too far, there are other, more repugnant recurring themes among commenters, too). They're right; going public was not the only way Richards could get a relatively minor issue addressed. She could have confronted the two men or she could have gone straight to PyCon. Her actions only escalated the situation.

In a blog post explaining the story in her own words, Richards wrote about how, over the course of the jokes, she moved from “I was going to let it go” to “I realized I had to do something.” The moment of decision came after seeing a picture of a young girl on the main stage who had attended a Young Coders workshop. “She would never have the chance to learn and love programming,” Richards wrote, “because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so.”

Clearly, this is hyperbole. These two guys weren’t going to prevent anybody from doing anything. Suddenly, a couple off-color jokes represented all the serious forces that can hold women back from tech careers. While denouncing bad behavior certainly has its place, proportion is important—and this approach to these jokes simply makes it harder to have a sincere discussion about misogyny and men's/women's issues in the workplace.

Richards decided that her method of intervention would combine public shaming on Twitter as well as pinging PyCon organizers to do something about the incident. Richards said that she “was a guest in the Python community and as such, I wanted to give PyCon the opportunity to address this.” This is why she did not confront the two men directly. Instead, she pinged PyCon and, well, the rest of the Internet. Sledgehammer, meet nail. (To its great credit, PyCon appears to have handled the issue well, speaking to both parties and securing an apology from the developers.)

In the aftermath, one of the developers lost his job and Richards eventually lost hers too. While I believe that Richards unfairly shamed these guys in public (two wrongs don’t make a right, as they say), PlayHaven and SendGrid emerge as the real reputational losers here. Ironically, the companies shared in the same core mistake Richards made. The asymmetry of incident and response has now elevated Donglegate from dust-up into life-changing event for at least two people, and it didn't have to end this way at all.

On Sunday at PyCon, Adria Richards felt comments made behind her during a conference session were inappropriate and of an offensive, sexual nature. We understand that Adria believed the conduct to be inappropriate and support her right to report the incident to PyCon personnel. To be clear, SendGrid supports the right to report inappropriate behavior, whenever and wherever it occurs.

What we do not support was how she reported the conduct. Her decision to tweet the comments and photographs of the people who made the comments crossed the line. Publicly shaming the offenders – and bystanders – was not the appropriate way to handle the situation. Even PyCon has since updated their Code of Conduct due to this situation. Needless to say, a heated public debate ensued. The discourse, productive at times, quickly spiraled into extreme vitriol.

A SendGrid developer evangelist’s responsibility is to build and strengthen our Developer Community across the globe. In light of the events over the last 48+ hours, it has become obvious that her actions have strongly divided the same community she was supposed to unite. As a result, she can no longer be effective in her role at SendGrid.

In the end, the consequences that resulted from how she reported the conduct put our business in danger. Our commitment to our 130 employees, their families, our community members and our more than 130,000 valued customers is our primary concern.

tl;dr: it's a bit of a 3-way:* They disagree (as many do) with the way she handled the event* They feel she can't effectively be a dev evangelist for them anymore (can't fault them on that)* She indirectly put the whole business and customers in dangers (which is probably a reference to the DDOS)

I came across that image while poking around for image ideas for this story, and Peter made an excellent observation: "dongle" jokes are obviously mainstream and tame enough that you can air them on the largest commercial broadcast in the world (eek hope that's true, it's big though!) and apparently no one blinks.

We don't know what the joke actually was, and I'm not even really trying to excuse it, but I do think it's fascinating that it's apparently part of our cultural experience, and not just limited to bearded programmers.

Everyone lost today. Tech, the Python community, the programming community, men, women, the 2 people who got fired, everyone.

Perhaps Adria should have exposed their behavior in some other way, like writing to the PyCon people directly, or turning around and speaking to the guys herself. But she didn't. And you know what? The "hey, look at these assholes!" pic and tweet kind of stuff happens all the time, all over the world. You or I have probably done something similar, but it just faded into the background of inane content that no one cares about. Regardless of her previous behavior online (which quite frankly, seems to be a little racist at times), I don't feel that she was in the wrong in this specific instance.

Basically, two dudes said something stupid. She tweeted "look at these assholes!" PlayHaven extremely overreacted by firing one of the dudes. Parts of the Python and perhaps parts of the general programming community extremely overreacted to Adria. SendGrid overreacted slightly by firing Adria.

Yes, SendGrid needs to have developer advocates that can represent their company in a good light. I think firing Adria right now makes them also look bad, in the "Sorry men, she's gone now, can we be friends again? kthxbye!" vein. What SendGrid should have done is give Adria a chance to quell the situation in SendGrid's favor, or at least give her guidance in how to do so. Maybe even suspend her, or some sort of internal corporate disciplinary action, and let this whole controversy end with time. Adria may learn from this on how to handle the internet dragon better, but SendGrid lost the opportunity to have this stronger person work for them. Maybe she won't learn anything from this, but the timing of her firing was still poor PR for SendGrid. Keep in mind, I still don't think her initial tweet was morally wrong.

SendGrid made the mistake of thinking that the few vocal assholes represents everyone. I'd bet the majority of the Python community just wishes that everyone would shut the fuck up and code. Unfortunately, in human behavior, the loud people get the attention, and online, those are assholes and trolls.

Unfortunately, PlayHaven and SendGrid were so afraid of the internet dragon, that they sacrificed two people to it in an attempt to appease. The thing is, the internet dragon is never appeased, it's never full, it's rage and fire never ends. All you can do is turn it's attention elsewhere, or hide until it moves on to other prey.

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Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher

Except, that men never over react like this to a fucking joke, THIS is what Feminism has taught everyone, that there's an (artificial) war between the sexes, of course men seem to know it's not a real war, but women are being duped right and left, and no that doesn't mean they're weak and need to be infantilized and coddled, it means they need to grow the fuck up and start thinking.

I feel like I'm gonna get a lot of downvotes for this, but some things need to be said.

1. There is no such thing as reverse racism.2. There is no such thing as misandry.3. Saying that white people can and have suffered anything like the systematic oppression POC do is racist.4. Saying the same of men and women is misogynistic. Every last bit of discrimination men have ever suffered is a result of the patriarchy. 5. Equality is not as cut and dry as you'd like it to be.

This whole fiasco brought the worst out of the Internet. The vast majority of people, instead of engaging in civilized discussion, picked the "team" they're on and proceeded to attack "the other team".

Had I been Richard's employer, I'd have fired her too. I mean, the vigilante-esq nature of her comments coupled with hypocrisy regarding sex-jokes do not point to a person I would want to represent my company. It equates to bad publicity, most clearly shown by the DDoS attacks. Clearly flipping the tables at a moderately out of place big dongle joke is not standing up for one's rights, it's vicious behaviour that should be dealt with. That said, the odd crass joke here and there is also something to be dealt with.

Oh noez! That's Misogynystic! Anything evar said bad about a woman is the hatred of all women! You should've gotten the memo to never think logically again!

I feel like I'm gonna get a lot of downvotes for this, but some things need to be said.

1. There is no such thing as reverse racism.2. There is no such thing as misandry.3. Saying that white people can and have suffered anything like the systematic oppression POC do is racist.4. Saying the same of men and women is misogynistic. Every last bit of discrimination men have ever suffered is a result of the patriarchy. 5. Equality is not as cut and dry as you'd like it to be.

Even though I disagree with what Richards did and think SendGrid was correct (and had no choice but) to fire her, I can't help feeling that she did fulfill her purpose to some degree. People in the tech community are going to be more careful about careless banter (for at least a month or so), which is something that wouldn't have happened if she'd handled the matter more appropriately in private.

If evangelising your cause is more important than evangelising your employer's products, then this sort of reaction does pay a dividend.

Well, maybe I'm wrong in this, but both the firings were entirely justified, and hopefully they'll all remember that the next time they're at a 'professional' event, to behave professionally.

The guys will (I hope) refrain from unprofessional conduct and keep their dongle jokes to themselves, and she will know to respect the proper chain of 'authority' when it comes to dealing with issues (ie: talking to the organizers instead of pulling a high-schoolish public outing on the twitter-verse).

I would have thought that these 'adults' would have outgrown that kind of behavior... guess not.

I feel like I'm gonna get a lot of downvotes for this, but some things need to be said.

1. There is no such thing as reverse racism.2. There is no such thing as misandry.3. Saying that white people can and have suffered anything like the systematic oppression POC do is racist.4. Saying the same of men and women is misogynistic. Every last bit of discrimination men have ever suffered is a result of the patriarchy. 5. Equality is not as cut and dry as you'd like it to be.

Are you stupid?

This the exact response I expected to get.

Then why waste your time trolling?

Because its not trolling. This is perfectly sincere. I take it you are not familiar with the radical wing of the social justice movement.

She was fired for standing up for what she said online; well, perhaps no one has stopped to consider that this is probably not the only time she's been exposed to such inane, unnecessary misogyny?

Misogyny is defined as the hatred of women.. From what I understand of the "joke" in question, it didn't reference women and the developers were not directing the comment at a women. If I am wrong, please point me to some better facts.

So, while she may have had to endure misogyny before, it has no bearing on this event. She overreacted in a very public fashion about some juvenile comments she overheard. That's why she got fired.

I feel like I'm gonna get a lot of downvotes for this, but some things need to be said.

1. There is no such thing as reverse racism.2. There is no such thing as misandry.3. Saying that white people can and have suffered anything like the systematic oppression POC do is racist.4. Saying the same of men and women is misogynistic. Every last bit of discrimination men have ever suffered is a result of the patriarchy. 5. Equality is not as cut and dry as you'd like it to be.

Are you stupid?

This the exact response I expected to get.

Then why waste your time trolling?

I'm not trolling.

In that case, you and marcusj0015 share a severe lack of common sense and perspective.

I'm going to disagree. While the comments are tacky and completely inappropriate, they're no worse than the juvenile things said in the comments section of any major online website. The commenters should be ashamed of themselves, but there is precisely zero chance of Richards being raped and/or murdered.

The loss of reputation and financial stability between both parties is the worst overreaction. I hope this further highlights the dangers of social media and how it's not the government alone that we need to be concerned of recording in public space.

This is certainly a case of "He said. She said." I can only speculate on what was actually said, since there were no recordings or witnesses other than the accused and accuser.

Ms Richards, however, has shown herself to be wholly irrational and spiteful. Shaming someone in front of the entire world because you don't feel comfortable with them is vindictive and aggressive, and it's not the way anyone should act. It is a shining example of just how horrible people can be to each other. She seemed to revel in her spitefulness and hypocrisy, and that's just disgusting. Far more disgusting and offensive than a double entendre could ever be. If the young man who was terminated was terminated even in small part because of her actions, she should be held accountable. I can only hope that this was the reason Ms Richards was terminated. I wouldn't want her working for me either.

Reading all of this--and yes, I'm caught up--the only thing that recurs to me is "slow news day".

There are always going to be people that act like children. It's rare to have someone ignore my request when I came to them as an adult and stated their conduct was inappropriate.

Seriously: all tha little chidrens at PyCon need to put on their big boy--and girl--caps and act like grownups. This idiocy --which goes in all directions--doesn't go over in high school. Why did any of the parties think they were going to skirt by unscathed here?

My friends and I had decided forking someone's repo is a new form of flattery (the highest form being implementation) and we were excited about one of the presenters projects; a friend said "I would fork that guys repo" The sexual context was applied by Adria, and not us.)

My friends and I had decided forking someone's repo is a new form of flattery (the highest form being implementation) and we were excited about one of the presenters projects; a friend said "I would fork that guys repo" The sexual context was applied by Adria, and not us.)

I came across that image while poking around for image ideas for this story, and Peter made an excellent observation: "dongle" jokes are obviously mainstream and tame enough that you can air them on the largest commercial broadcast in the world (eek hope that's true, it's big though!) and apparently no one blinks.

We don't know what the joke actually was, and I'm not even really trying to excuse it, but I do think it's fascinating that it's apparently part of our cultural experience, and not just limited to bearded programmers.

I think you miss the point, Ken. It's not about any particular individual. It's about the culture that excuses and encourages such aggression to women, such misogyny. It's pervasive - just look at the comments here and elsewhere; they blame the woman for being offended, they offer that tech is a man's world and if you can't cope, go join a sewing circle (I've been told that). It's not about what one person jokes, it's about the "laddish" tech culture that is overtly and actively hostile to women, not just women developers. It's about how some men are proud to be exclusionary and boorish.

There is a legitimate problem with the tech world's handling of women. Two friends people making punning sex jokes isn't one of the problems. She is free to be offended. As a human surrounded by other humans though, she needs to be able to handle offense with a smidgen of social grace and proportionality.

Quote:

She was fired for standing up for what she said online; well, perhaps no one has stopped to consider that this is probably not the only time she's been exposed to such inane, unnecessary misogyny?

She was fired for bad judgment in public that effected her ability to do her job as a PR person. There were a lot of good ways to handle the situation she was in. The simplest was probably to turn around and tell them to shut up and that they are in public. They probably would have looked appropriately embarrassed and called it a day. She could even then go right to twitter and complained about sexist comments and juvenile without pointing out who she was talking about. If she didn't want the confrontation, should could have just told the conference staff (as she did). She can't however, without a word, start posting people's pictures and overheard conversations online.

Richards could hold down an editorial position at Bitch Magazine, rant daily about sexism in the industry, and still keep her PR job. Her opinion on the offensiveness of sexual puns isn't the issue. How she dealt with her offense IS the issue. She dealt with being offended very poorly, and for a PR person, that is the kiss of death.

My friends and I had decided forking someone's repo is a new form of flattery (the highest form being implementation) and we were excited about one of the presenters projects; a friend said "I would fork that guys repo" The sexual context was applied by Adria, and not us.)

Individuals have the right to determine what offends them. If she was offended, you have no right to tell her she should not be, even if you yourself would not and can point to N people who share your views.

Exactly my point. People choose whether they will be offended by something or not. I cannot make anyone else feel offended or anything else. People are responsible for their own feelings and how they choose to react to them. Hence, people today in our society seem to go out of their way to be offended. Why is that?

I feel like I'm gonna get a lot of downvotes for this, but some things need to be said.

1. There is no such thing as reverse racism.2. There is no such thing as misandry.3. Saying that white people can and have suffered anything like the systematic oppression POC do is racist.4. Saying the same of men and women is misogynistic. Every last bit of discrimination men have ever suffered is a result of the patriarchy. 5. Equality is not as cut and dry as you'd like it to be.

Yup, you probably will get down voted... mostly because it is horribly off topic. The issue revolves around whether or not what the developers was doing was sexist, if Richards response was correct, and if the response of the companies in question is correct. No one has made any claims of 1-5.

So yes, your comment is going to get down voted, because it is dumb and doesn't add anything.

My friends and I had decided forking someone's repo is a new form of flattery (the highest form being implementation) and we were excited about one of the presenters projects; a friend said "I would fork that guys repo" The sexual context was applied by Adria, and not us.)

Now I'm confused. Did she think this was a gay joke?

The reality is that it's impossible to know with any certainty exactly what was said and in what context. The only thing to do is marvel at the severely disappointing lack of maturity displayed by both parties involved.